By Martin B. Cassidy
Staff Writer
March 15, 2008
In an effort to cut down on unwarranted high speed responses and
the accidents that can result, fire commanders have adopted new
guidelines on how many fire trucks need to race to some fire and
emergency calls.
"The goal is to cut down on unnecessary high speed
responses," Greenwich Assistant Chief Robert Kick said.
"If you look at a lot of the departments around the country,
they are limiting the number of additional apparatus which are
responding at high speed."
The department will evaluate whether the new guidelines being
followed has any impact on reducing accidents, Kick said.
Fire engines are sent to calls in two different ways in
Greenwich, Code 10 and Code 20, Kick said.
During Code 10 calls, the engine drives with the flow of traffic
without lights and sirens, while a Code 20 involves activating
sirens and driving at high speed.
How many fire engines respond at top speed to any given call is
laid out in operating procedures and depends partly on the
urgency and magnitude of a fire or other emergency, Kick said.
Those operating procedures have been modified to avoid sending
units at high speed unnecessarily.
Except for the downtown and North Street fire houses, town fire
stations are staffed with two-man crews, requiring multiple
engines to be deployed to emergency calls, Kick said.
Under federal law, a minimum of four firefighters must be at the
scene of a fire before firefighting efforts begin.
Last year, the Board of Estimate & Taxation asked fire
officials to find ways to cut down on the number of fire
department accidents, which can cause damage to both public and
private property and in some cases appeared avoidable. Since
2006, the department has made efforts to curb accidents by
emphasizing defensive driving techniques during responses and
reviewing accidents to determine if drivers made mistakes, fire
officials said.
While the number of fire department accidents dropped from 40 in
the 2004-2005 fiscal year to 24 in 2006-2007, according to town
statistics, a continual effort to reduce fire department
accidents is needed, Larry Simon, a member of the BET's audit
committee, said.
Fire engines are more accident-prone because of their size and
the number of false alarms they respond to, Simon said.
"A lot of it was caused by the number of calls we're
making," Simon said. "Also, sometimes you don't have
the right equipment and when these big vehicles get in accidents
they cause more damage than when a pickup truck hits the
curb." Volunteer firefighters support the new policy and
believe it will help reduce the probability of costly accidents
and repairs, Jerry Cotrone, president of the Greenwich Volunteer
Firefighters Association, said.
"We have to be as responsible as we can in not causing
accidents," Cotrone said.
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